31.1.09

27.1.09

It’s Laurie Duggan week here on the deletions. His new book, a long poem chronicling his life in ‘East Kent & elsewhere’ during the year 2006 - 07, has just arrived in my letterbox. I’ve read much of this poem while it was in-progress, and from that I'd recommend it. I’m looking forward to reclining on the banana lounge under the cherry tree later this afternoon and reading it in published form.

’Crab & Winkle’ is a warped Shepherd's Calendar for the age of climate change: a journal of Australian poet Laurie Duggan's first year as a resident in England, it centres specifically on the area of East Kent where he lives, featuring excursions and interludes elsewhere in Britain, the Continent and North Africa. The book's title comes from an old railway route in the heart of Duggan's new territory.

It’s published by Shearsman BooksFor further information or to order a copy visit this linkPlus : to read and engage with Laurie Duggan's response to the recently published 'Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry' - click here

in the USA public toilets flush automatically which can be alarming
all announcers have Spanish accents
the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry is really realism
Ron Silliman’s VOG is Voice Over Guy, Voice Of God, Very Ordinary Glory
Vital Organs Grim …

Famous American Female Poet :
‘What you might need to know is that you might not make it
But if you do, you might have needed an astrolabe
or a two-bit smile or smirk, this is a style
that could get you a cup of coffee’

AMERICAN coffee ??
old worms in the woodwork
old hooks on the hat rack
old bottomless cups depleted

As Portentous As The Opening Chords Of A Big Bob Dylan Ballad
the prescience of the dead

Yours truly, Your paranormal host,
Adelaide hooray at last here’s the panorama coming up now

discover all the charms of ELEGANT and CONTEMPORARY
melbourne

cross the west gate bridge for AMAZING city views
observe the yarra river's BUSTLING ACTIVITY
see queen victoria market, fitzroy gardens
and albert park, home to the australian formula one grand prix.
visit the HISTORIC shrine of remembrance
stroll along southbank's waterfront precinct

17.1.09

Another year has begun and it's definitely time to begin it, so I've been sorting through some box files and folders and throwing out old clippings, photocopies, maps, pictures, postcards. Allow me a little personal indulgence - here, from the piles of files is a tiny sample from hundreds of bits and pieces. Remember, if you click on the images you can enlarge them. I'll start with a set of the card game 'Happy Families' I made, with my mother Jean, when I was seven years old. You can view the entire pack here. Clunkily cut cardboard, dribbly watercolour - I wasn't anywhere close to being even a 'budding' artist but there were hours of fun up ahead playing cards.

Little images or notes found or clipped or kept, like one of my father's military notebooks, or a scrap of paper, a ticket, a jigsaw piece, a label popped into a pocket, placed in a notebook and later saved in a box file :

12.1.09

Cover illustration by Julia Wolfson.Ekleksographia is an independent international poetry magazine edited, produced and published by Jesse Glass, Daniel Sendecki and a revolving panel of editors. The publication revolves completely around their efforts and therefore maintains a somewhat irregular publication schedule, averaging about 2 issues a year. Ekleksographia employs a 'revolving editor' system—the magazine retains a panel of editors, each of which edits one issue every so often.

Ekleksographia is published as an Ahadada Books cooperative publication. Editors and contributors are asked actively to contribute both their talents and their time to the publication.

Ekleksographia is an exercise in asymmetrical publishing, and is a shoe (or even two!) thrown at the spotlit shrug and yawn.

This issue was curated by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa. Jane's third book of poems, EXHIBIT C, has been published by Ahadada (autumn, 2008). Her other poetry books are Skin Museum (2006) and Aquiline (2007).

7.1.09

I am reading Loiterature, happily not an obsessively-linear book, by the only Australian member of OuLiPo, Ross Chambers, who is currently the Marvin Felheim Distinguished University Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan and is a Visiting Professor at Louisiana State University.

The cover image of ‘Loiterature’ is a detail from a photograph by Montague Glover

I’ve been giving up caffeine for years now, but a caffé latte steams at my elbow. Midsummer:

Wet heat drifts through the afternoon like a campus dog, a fraternity ghost waiting to stay home from football games The arches are empty clear to the sky

These verses might have been written (or composed, or generated) only a few yards from where I sit, at the intersection of N. University and S. State in Ann Arbor, the suture point (in my personal myth of the city) where the campus meets the town. No campus dogs in evidence (expensive animals on leashes don’t qualify). Times change. When Frank O’Hara came to Ann Arbor in 1950 he was amused by the Midwestern candor of the cafeteria signs that read, bluntly, FOOD; today they’re more likely to read cappuccino, and it’s hard to find a cafeteria:

Sitting lazily at this much frequented intersection, I think about intersections and I think about belatedness, my regret for an Ann Arbor I never knew (and wouldn’t have liked), the stab of Baudelaire’s midline exclamation point at “hélas!”, the image of abstention - better still, of anticipated abstention - in “waiting to stay home from football games.” Being belated, one foot in 1950, the other in the 1990s, is (like abstaining and anticipating) a form of divided attention, the “distracted” attention Benjamin thought characteristic of modernity (was it Benjamin? I must remember to look it up). One foot in campus, one in town; one in 1950, one in 1994.....

Loiterature's back cover notes give a pretty good summary of the contents :The fabric of the western literary tradition is not always predictable. In one wayward strand, waywardness itself is at work, delay becomes almost predictable, triviality is auspicious, and failure is cheerfully admired. This is loiterature. Loiterature is the first book to identify this strand, to follow its path through major works and genres, and to evaluate its literary significance.

By offering subtle resistance to the laws of "good social order," loiterly literature blurs the distinctions between innocent pleasure and harmless relaxation on the one hand, and not-so-innocent intent on the other. The result is covert social criticism that casts doubt on the values good citizens hold dear—values like discipline, organization, productivity, and, above all, work. It levels this criticism, however, under the guise of innocent wit or harmless entertainment. Loiterature distracts attention the way a street conjurer diverts us with his sleight of hand.If the pleasurable has critical potential, may not one of the functions of the critical be to produce pleasure? The ability to digress, Ross Chambers suggests, is at the heart of both, and loiterature’s digressive waywardness offers something to ponder for critics of culture as well as lovers of literature.